architect, designer, philosopher, technologist

Aletheia Ida is an architect, designer, philosopher, and socio-environmental technologist. She has over fifteen years experience in professional architecture practice and is fluent with building performance analytics. She holds a Doctorate of Philosophy in Architectural Sciences from the Center for Architecture, Science, and Ecology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ conducting design research on emerging environmental building technologies.

The context of her work explores a terrain at the obfuscated boundaries between medium and matter. As in the carving of sandy littoral inlets by ocean tides or the temporal sublimation of icebergs shaped by forces of wind and sun, it is the interrelationship of phenomenological medium and a material ethic that provide for determinant formalization of content in this work. Stemming from a philosophical position that medium, matter, form, and process constitute the four causes in the nature of making, this work seeks a territory that eliminates delimitations of medium and matter through corresponding morphological and environmentally compatible relationships. The choreography of medium flows through material conditions provides for contingent form. Whether it is the scale of the phonon emanating through matter in lattice vibrations, or the spatiotemporal scale of the solar path imparting depths of shadows through structures. Form becomes situated amidst a frozen process integrating this simultaneity like a cross-section through space and time. The rational basis for the construction of objects need not reside solely within tehcne or disegno, but rather amongst a poetic complexity of sentient response to social and environmental phenomena through material organization.